Esteban and I went out to dinner on Friday night. After some aimless driving, during which Esteban regaled me with analogies of how hungry he was and what exactly he would eat at that very moment if it were available to him, he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t yet taken me to the new Japanese restaurant downtown, a place he’s frequented for lunch several times and was known for its sushi.
The downtown of Green Bay is a strange place. It bookends a large river, leaving residents on either side with the feeling that the other side is miles and mindsets away when in actuality it is only perhaps 75 yards across one of the two downtown drawbridges. You may scoff at this, but my Grandmother has only been in my home perhaps three times in the six years we’ve lived here. She lives less than a mile away, but because she must cross the river to there, it might as well be a hundred. Green Bay is not so much a congruous town but rather a conglomeration of neighborhoods, almost the way that New York City is really an accumulation of smaller cities. I know there are people in the older generation, the generation that remembers war bonds and The Shadow radio program, who do not venture on the opposite shore of the Fox River more than perhaps once a year.
When I was a senior in high school, an old man named Cyril ‘Cy’ Jacobi (I remember the strangest shit, y’all, seriously. Remembering things like that old man’s name is going to clutter up my brain for the rest of my life and I won’t be able to remember the names of my grandkids. Just you watch.) got drunk at the east side 1001 Club (pronounced ‘Ten Oh One Club’. A very old Green Bay institution at 1001 Main Street, with a history of 25 cent glasses of tap beer and an excellent Friday perch fry) in the deepest darkest bowels of January, when there’s not much to do but drink yourself warm. He then pointed his ancient Buick west, toward the Main Street Bridge, but he never made it home to his little old man house. The bridgetender reported that the safety railing on the old bridge had broken free that very same night but they did not suspect that Cy had gone over the bridge, mostly because the river was still crusted with ice. Given the turbulent nature of ice on rivers, it was hard to tell if the ice was untouched or had been penetrated by a Buick and then refrozen, as the temperatures that night had dipped into the unforgiving forty below zero range. What was certain: the old man was gone. A shiny 8-foot railing replaced the broken segment on the bridge. ‘Missing’ flyers went up and after several months, began to take on a kind of dismal antiquity, curling around the edges as the hope faded from them. That spring, every now and then, someone would say ‘Shame about that Cy, in so?’ And the listener would respond gravely ‘Oh, yah!’, with the appropriate concerned expression. It was the right thing to do, even though everyone knew that at the bottom of the river sat a 1974 Buick with a 1926 Cy inside of it. That, of course, was proven that April, once the ice had long melted or broken into chunks and floated away, when they sent divers down into the 34-degree water and then later a crane. But it really just reinforced the deeply held belief that Going Across Town was Dangerous Business.
Besides this duality, there is also the fact that downtown was gutted twenty-five years ago. They tore 70% of the character and personality down, the wizened buildings and facades, and replaced it with large parking ramps and cumbersome mall, cursed with that horrible kind of impossible-to-fix 1978 architecture. They also blocked up several of the streets and made almost every remaining street one-way. Therefore, any trip downtown meant you couldn’t go that way and you couldn’t turn right there and no, that street doesn’t go there any more. The mall was a success for about ten years but eventually the shoppers turned to the slightly newer mall in the suburbs, the one with free parking and no gangs of roving urban teenagers or mentally unstable. A relative of Mo’s ex-husband recently purchased the mall and tore out the food court to restore one of the streets, but really, the damage has already been done. Green Bay is a town with a long memory. Once we’ve passed judgment, it takes a lot of convincing to make us change our minds.
Esteban and I, on the other hand, are not afraid of downtown or of crossing the river. I am actually quite fond of downtown, with the exception of the mall, which is like a cholesterol-ridden aorta. I like the way it’s quiet, as though we’re a very small town and not a sprawling city of some 100,000 and change. I like the way it is surrounded by a half dozen churches and cathedrals, all built by different groups of immigrants, all with weighty bells and oxidized copper flashings and bleached stone carvings like chantilly lace along their doorways. I like the way that sometimes you can catch a magical moment when you are standing in a particular spot and for five minutes, all of the bells will ring in rapid succession all the way around you, playing songs I remember singing in religious school when I was ten. During December, you can count upon Handel’s Messiah from the cathedral, with its two haughty identical spires, chimes calling and answering to each other in twin speak.
We went to the other side of the river, away from the mall and the attempts to ‘fix’ downtown, to Broadway. As little as five years ago when I used to be the assistant director of the homeless shelter on Broadway, this area was home to the roughest bars, the scummiest restaurants and the canneries and shipping docks that hire anyone. But currently, the area is in a sort of renewal. The Salvation Army thrift shop relocated and was replaced by an upscale furniture store. The old movie theatre has been turned into a combo arty theatre/gay nightclub. The 24-hour diner that made greasy eggs and alcohol absorbing hash has moved ironically near the nice mall in the suburbs. Sculptures line the sidewalk. There are now two microbreweries, one in the old train depot. Incidentally, the Bad Bar is also on this street.
We passed a band playing Christmas carols in a vestibule. Someone had wrapped the trees with tiny white lights, transforming them from utilitarian brooms propped in the corner after a day spent sweeping the sky. Esteban and I parked his truck and walked the couple of blocks up to the restaurant where we had clear soup that warmed our tummies, appetizers of edamame and gyoza, and Bento boxes. Mine was sushi and sesame chicken with sticky rice and shrimp sauce. The sushi was spectacular, and I was giddy at the prospect of really good sushi in Green Bay. I was brought back down to earth when the waitress felt the need to ask if we knew that sushi was raw fish, right? I burnt myself with the wasabi, as I always do. You’ve taken too much and by the time you realize it, it’s far too late and you just ride the wave of heat building up through the roof of your mouth, up into your nose, blowing the top of your head off and then it is gone as quickly as it came. I love wasabi. It’s so forgiving.
We left with impossibly full stomachs; Esteban carrying a little box of my leftover zucchini, sticky rice and shrimp sauce. He ventured into a neighboring Asian grocery store. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking at more food, but I was only wearing a v-neck t-shirt and a grey cardigan sweater and the clear night temperatures were hovering in the low twenties. I ducked into an art gallery where they were launching the season.
One woman, undoubtedly an artist or one of those affluent patrons who dress eclectically in the attempt to look less than ordinary, blocked the way. She was slight, very grandmotherly with that closely shorn grey hair like a coif (and let me tell you, that is apparently a medieval hat that fits very closely to the head. I called my PA while writing this and explained the word I was looking for because the closest I could come up with was ‘yarmulke’ which wasn’t right at all, and he searched the Internet and found a coif. I’m still not sure that’s the type of hat I’m going for, though. I mean the hat the chick wore during the church scene in Knight’s Tale. But that doesn’t sound as good, ‘very grandmotherly with that closely shorn grey hair, like the hat worn by the chick in the church scene in A Knight’s Tale).
She wore head to toe lavender, not just lavender–everything the precisely perfect shade of lavender, from her big fluffy alpaca jacket down to a pair of non-sensible (and ridiculous when you consider the weather) super-pointy toed shoes. They were Glinda The Good Witch kind of shoes, not shoes for tromping around on the lower west side and avoiding slick ice puddles. Perhaps she had a footman who would carry her on his back, her little lavender toes pointing the way from under his arms. She was standing in the middle of the gallery, blocking this way and that with her huge fluffy lavender shoulders. She looked like a cotton puff that’s been rolled around in scented purple body powder.
I wandered around the store apologetically, feeling somehow lesser in my grey/black/white ensemble, my big clumpy shoes with the thick soles, my big ass that could in no way be transported on the back of a footman to an art gallery, to the back where I found a display of art mittens. Art MITTENS! They were enormous woolen mittens, all clothespinned to a wooden display. I’ve been searching for the perfect pair of grey woolen mittens that fit my non-feminine childlike pudgy hands. These mittens were enormous, however, knitted by lumberjacks, and had strange and unfamiliar’dare I say ‘tacky’? ‘appliqu’s on them. I suppose to make them Art Mittens and justify the $40 price tag. They were truly lovely and had they a pair of grey ones, or even a pair that wasn’t Goliath-sized, I would have walked out with a smile on my face and a balance of something other than $0.00 on my credit card. But they didn’t and outside my own flannelled footman was waiting with my takeout container full of sticky rice so I once again navigated my way around the Human Cotton Puff and walked emptyhanded into the cold.
It had just started snowing, the kind of weak pre-Thanksgiving snow that starts and stops without ever making its intention known. We walked down the street, me crossing my arms over my chest, pulling my cardigan’which was really only the IDEA of a sweater’closer around me and Esteban chastising me for not wearing a coat, surrounded by century-old buildings that now glitter with new fixtures, fresh paint chosen for historical accuracy and cheery puffs of smoke rising up from their chimneys. It was a white breath night and you could almost hear the river beginning to crust over, water lapping against the narrowing ice banks in time with the brass ensemble’s horns bouncing off the brick edifices. We passed the old Fairmont Dairy building and the old dairy stables, where phantoms of long gone big Belgian horses waited, pawing the ground at the evening revelers and Christmas carols, knowing they would be hitched to ghostly milk wagons in just a few hours. Somewhere, a train whistled. Esteban held out his free arm, offering me his elbow, warning, ‘Watch right there, it’s icy.’ I linked my arm in his and then snuggled in closer to his flannelled bulk, relishing the warmth, and we walked to his truck together.
